Lesser Greatness
Why architects should not be trusted
Regular readers will know by now that “Upper Italy” dislikes news and, especially, being forced by circumstances to write about it.
It is then with considerable pleasure that we report the American President George W. Bush made a state visit to Rome yesterday and not much happened. Even the ritual window smashing was toneless and half-hearted – demonstrating once again how much better the Germans are at street violence.
President Bush was received by Prime Minister Prodi with an appropriate degree of insolence and hostility on both sides. Bush left the encounter announcing that he was going off to have coffee with his “good friend and leader of the opposition” Silvio Berlusconi. Just in case you weren’t paying attention, this is not much done on “state” occasions and is the kind of gesture that is supposed to be reserved to private visits – or to when you really want to piss off some jerk Prime Minister.
Now that that is out of the way, we can get down to the subject that actually interests us.
The remarkable building in the photograph above is the Ryugyong Hotel in lively Pyongyang, North Korea. Its 105 (empty) stories rise to 330 meters, a little over a thousand feet. The circular things at the top – the “foreskin” analog – are eight different rotating floors. They are capped by six more static floors, but you can’t quite make those out.
Here is the key part though: “Construction started in 1987 and ceased in 1992 . Had it been completed, it would have been the world’s tallest hotel.” The money, and very likely the food, ran out.
Because you really must get a load of this awful hulk in all its mastodontic substance, if you click (here) a considerably larger copy of the same image will appear in a new window. This will reveal that the vertical black speck in the near foreground is a human being.
The structure, whose construction was at one time estimated to be absorbing around two percent of the entire GDP of North Korea, has never been opened to the public. Indeed, it has never been furnished with windows, doors or fittings of any other kind and has more or less been left to rot – to the degree that reinforced concrete “rots” anyhow. But it is reported to be very bad concrete…
There is a Wikipedia article on the building (here), though we have the better photograph.
North Korea’s many and painful eccentricities in the face of a starving population are well known and we are not adding anything new to them with this note. We’re not even entirely certain why we’ve written it, except that it has something to do with what happens when dangerous mediocrity comes to coincide with political power.